第43章

Add to all this that Pupkin and Zena had been to the Church of England Church nearly every Sunday evening for two months, and one evening they had even gone to the Presbyterian Church "for fun,"which, if you know Mariposa, you will realize to be a wild sort of escapade that ought to speak volumes.

Yet in spite of this, Pupkin felt that the thing was hopeless: which only illustrates the dreadful ups and downs, the wild alternations of hope and despair that characterise an exceptional affair of this sort.

Yes, it was hopeless.

Every time that Pupkin watched Zena praying in church, he knew that she was too good for him.Every time that he came to call for her and found her reading Browning and Omar Khayyam he knew that she was too clever for him.And every time that he saw her at all he realized that she was too beautiful for him.

You see, Pupkin knew that he wasn't a hero.When Zena would clasp her hands and talk rapturously about crusaders and soldiers and firemen and heroes generally, Pupkin knew just where he came in.Not in it, that was all.If a war could have broken out in Mariposa, or the judge's house been invaded by the Germans, he might have had a chance, but as it was--hopeless.

Then there was Zena's father.Heaven knows Pupkin tried hard to please the judge.He agreed with every theory that Judge Pepperleigh advanced, and that took a pretty pliable intellect in itself.They denounced female suffrage one day and they favoured it the next.One day the judge would claim that the labour movement was eating out the heart of the country, and the next day he would hold that the hope of the world lay in the organization of the toiling masses.Pupkin shifted his opinions like the glass in a kaleidoscope.Indeed, the only things on which he was allowed to maintain a steadfast conviction were the purity of the Conservative party of Canada and the awful wickedness of the recall of judges.

But with all that the judge was hardly civil to Pupkin.He hadn't asked him to the house till Zena brought him there, though, as a rule, all the bank clerks in Mariposa treated Judge Pepperleigh's premises as their own.He used to sit and sneer at Pupkin after he had gone till Zena would throw down the Pioneers of Tecumseh Township in a temper and flounce off the piazza to her room.After which the judge's manner would change instantly and he would relight his corn cob pipe and sit and positively beam with contentment.In all of which there was something so mysterious as to prove that Mr.Pupkin's chances were hopeless.

Nor was that all of it.Pupkin's salary was eight hundred dollars a year and the Exchange Bank limit for marriage was a thousand.

I suppose you are aware of the grinding capitalistic tyranny of the banks in Mariposa whereby marriage is put beyond the reach of ever so many mature and experienced men of nineteen and twenty and twenty-one, who are compelled to go on eating on a meal ticket at the Mariposa House and living over the bank to suit the whim of a group of capitalists.

Whenever Pupkin thought of this two hundred dollars he understood all that it meant by social unrest.In fact, he interpreted all forms of social discontent in terms of it.Russian Anarchism, German Socialism, the Labour Movement, Henry George, Lloyd George,--he understood the whole lot of them by thinking of his two hundred dollars.

When I tell you that at this period Mr.Pupkin read Memoirs of the Great Revolutionists and even thought of blowing up Henry Mullins with dynamite, you can appreciate his state of mind.

But not even by all these hindrances and obstacles to his love for Zena Pepperleigh would Peter Pupkin have been driven to commit suicide (oh, yes; he committed it three times, as I'm going to tell you), had it not been for another thing that he knew stood once and for all and in cold reality between him and Zena.

He felt it in a sort of way, as soon as he knew her.Each time that he tried to talk to her about his home and his father and mother and found that something held him back, he realized more and more the kind of thing that stood between them.Most of all did he realize it, with a sudden sickness of heart, when he got word that his father and mother wanted to come to Mariposa to see him and he had all he could do to head them off from it.

Why? Why stop them? The reason was, simple enough, that Pupkin was ashamed of them, bitterly ashamed.The picture of his mother and father turning up in Mariposa and being seen by his friends there and going up to the Pepperleigh's house made him feel faint with shame.

No, I don't say it wasn't wrong.It only shows what difference of fortune, the difference of being rich and being poor, means in this world.You perhaps have been so lucky that you cannot appreciate what it means to feel shame at the station of your own father and mother.

You think it doesn't matter, that honesty and kindliness of heart are all that counts.That only shows that you have never known some of the bitterest feelings of people less fortunate than yourself.

So it was with Mr.Pupkin.When he thought of his father and mother turning up in Mariposa, his face reddened with unworthy shame.

He could just picture the scene! He could see them getting out of their Limousine touring car, with the chauffeur holding open the door for them, and his father asking for a suite of rooms,--just think of it, a suite of rooms!--at the Mariposa House.

The very thought of it turned him ill.

What! You have mistaken my meaning? Ashamed of them because they were poor? Good heavens, no, but because they were rich! And not rich in the sense in which they use the term in Mariposa, where a rich person merely means a man who has money enough to build a house with a piazza and to have everything he wants; but rich in the other sense,--motor cars, Ritz hotels, steam yachts, summer islands and all that sort of thing.